Please Listen to This Song About Dildos From the Year 1600

Want to hear a classically trained countertenor sing a 400-year-old song about dildos?

Of course you do!

On Monday, Reddit’s Classical Music community surfaced Thomas Morley’s turn-of-the-16th-century autoerotic anthem “Will You Buy a Fine Dog?”—and it’s poised to make a comeback as the hottest track of 2015.

But first: a word of caution.

Once you click play, you will have a deeply inappropriate-sounding song stuck in your head for the rest of the foreseeable future:

How many dildos did you count? Ten? Twelve? Fifteen-point-five?

Singer Alfred Deller actually repeats the word dildo 20 times in just over a minute. At the 1:05 mark, he even glides through a cascade of notes on a trilling “di-i-i-i-i-i-i-ildo“—in case anyone in a five-mile radius missed it.

Naturally, many redditors—whose ears weren’t properly prepped for the experience—didn’t know how to react to the auditory stimulus.

Could this lute song from 1600 really be talking about sex toys? Was it that simple? Or did the word “dildo” mean something different in the 1600s? And what’s up with that line about a “dog with a hole in his head”?

To answer Epistaxis’ questions, Reddit’s historians delved deep. Really deep. But before we get into that, let’s hear that song again—this time sung by tenor Paul McMahon, with some gentle accompaniment from Swedish-born lute virtuoso Tommie Andersson:

A Nonsensical History of the Word “Dildo”

Although the Oxford English Dictionary describes its etymological root as “unknown,” theories abound. Some claim the word refers to bread baked with a phallic ingredient: pickles.

Why? Because “dill dough.” (Turns out bad puns make great fake etymologies.)

Pickle pic (Renee Comet/Wikimedia)

Others claim it’s a naughty twist on a nautical term. As Sea Talk defines the word, a dildo is a “wooden peg … mounted in the gunwales of rowing boats.”

The most reasonable explanation, however, is Online Etymology Dictionary’s oddly sweet theory that “dildo” is a “corruption of Italian deletto ‘delight,’ from Latin dilectio, noun of action from diligere ‘to esteem highly, to love.'”

Aww.

As Valerie Traub notes in Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns, the word eventually denoted not just faux-phalluses, but also gibberish.

“[W]hat is most curious about the history of [the word] ‘dildo,'” she writes, “is that it was also apparently a nonsense word, a literal manifestation of ‘no-thing,’ particularly evident, according to scholars, in ballad refrains, which often included ‘non-signifying’ syllables.”

Do-re-mi-fa-so-la-dil-do!

Thus, the word came to occupy a similar place as melodic filler phrases like “la la la,” “shoobie doobie,” or “wubba lubba dub dub.”

Please take a moment to imagine what jazz scat would sound like if 20th-century singers had “dildo” in their melodic phrasebook.

Fortunately, by the time the word appeared in Morley’s dildo-filled ditty (the year 1600, give or take), the formerly nonsensical term signified a definite, physical “thing.”

The same pickle from before, rotated 90-degrees (Renee Comet/Wikimedia)

User vertexoflife, self-described “historian of pornography,” notes that English speakers used the word in its “modern sense” (i.e., to refer to a usually artificial phallus) “by the 16th and 17th centuries.”

As proof, vertexoflife cites a contemporary poem by Thomas Nashe, titled “The Choice of Valentines,” which contains a more overt reference to dildos in the, ahem, “marital aid” sense:

My little dildoe shall supply your kind,
A youth that is as light as leaves in wind:
He bendeth not, nor foldeth any deal,
But stands as stiff as he were made of steel;
(And plays at peacock twixt my legs right blithe
And doeth my tickling swage with many a sigh;)
And when I will, he doth refresh me well,
And never makes my tender belly swell.

So it’s certainly plausible that the dildos of “Will You Buy a Fine Dog?” are, indeed, actual dildos.

As Vance Randolph explains in his book on English folk songs, Blow the Candle Out, Morley’s song probably describes a traveling salesman, selling some seedy 16th-century merchandise:

“The pedlar is announcing here his stock-in-trade, with heavy accent on the dildos and ‘other dainty tricks’ available (under the secret tray in his pack) ‘for the brisk lasses.’ Chapmen and pedlars of this itinerant kind have always stocked erotic ‘novelties’ and bawdy books, usually of small size, ‘that can be read with one hand.'”

A similar character pops up a couple decades after Morley’s song, in a 1623 play by a man whose last name sounds like a primitive euphemism for a vibrating dildo: William “Shakespeare.”

In Act IV, Scene IV of The Winter’s Tale, a pedlar named Autolycus is about to enter the stage when a servant describes him as having “the prettiest love-songs for maids … with such delicate burdens of dildos and fadings.”

(If only the dildo reference had appeared in As You Like It, right after Jacques’ soliloquy about how “all the men and women … have their exits and their entrances.”)

Like many Shakespearean turns of phrase, the “dildos and fadings” line is widely debated.

In Thinking Sex with Early Moderns, Valerie Traub weighs all the interpretations of Shakespeare’s bit about “dildos and fadings,” ultimately siding with a literary critic who believes the word “dildo” refers to an artificial phallus. (Notably, the critic’s name is John Pitcher. Just pointing that out.)

As for the “fine dog with a hole in his head,” well, porn historian vertexoflife has an answer for that:

“The ‘fine dog with the hole in his head’ likely refers to the fact that the higher-quality dildoes were supposed to shoot fluid out of them, it was seen as essential to women’s pleasure.”

(Note: If you’ve suddenly become more interested in vertexoflife’s fluid-shooting devices than Morley’s song, please remember that the history of all the world’s dildos is—like many of the dildos themselves—quite long. Far too long to try to squeeze it all in here. No matter how fascinating milk-squirting glass dildos are.)

Curiously, no one in the Ask Historians thread seemed concerned about the song’s reference to “muffs,” a word which Mina Gorji claims—in her book Rude Britannia—“has meant vagina and pubic hair since the 17th century.”

So sure, all of these songs and plays and poems of old may be precisely as dirty as they sound. But who ever said sex toys, double entendres, and immature song lyrics were modern inventions?

Oh, and here’s one more performance of Morley’s song—because no matter how mature you think you are (or how unamused you are with this song by now), it’s always good to end… with a dildo, dildo, diiiiiiiiiildo!